Month: January 2014

Once a Bush loyalist always a Bush loyalist

by digby

This Woodward account of Robert Gates’ new memoir makes me think more highly of Obama:

In Gates’s highly emotional account, Obama remains uncomfortable with the inherited wars and distrustful of the military that is providing him options. Their different worldviews produced a rift that, at least for Gates, became personally wounding and impossible to repair.

Yeah, whatever. It sounds as though Obama and Biden (who Gates loathed) were both skeptical of the military POV on this and that is to their credit. Civilian leadership should be skeptical of the military and challenge it to prove that what it says is necessary is actually necessary. They have many institutional and individual incentives to do otherwise.

Still, you have to wonder what might have been if the Obama team had understood that having a Republican Secretary of Defense would not help them politically. Not much I’d guess. When it comes to national security all president’s are dealing with a bipartisan majority that defines itself by its servility to hawkish imperatives.

Just look at this, happening even as we speak, via Kos:

A group of Democrats are joining Republicans in trying to undermine the White House’s negotiations with Iran by imposing a new set of sanctions. Fifteen of them, actually, who prefer status quo bluster and threats to diplomacy that might actually do something to end Iran’s nuclear ambitions. They are:
Bob Menendez (NJ)
Chuck Schumer (NY)
Ben Cardin (MD)
Bob Casey (PA)
Chris Coons (DE)
Dick Blumenthal (CT)
Mark Begich (AK)
Mark Pryor (AR)
Mary Landrieu (LA)
Kirsten Gillibrand (NY)
Mark Warner (VA)
Kay Hagan (NC)
Joe Donnelly (IN)
Cory Booker (NJ)
Joe Manchin (WV)

The Senate equivalent of the Blue Dog caucus is well represented on this list, with Begich, Casey, Donnelly, Landrieu, Manchin, Pryor, and Warner. I’ve always considered Coons and Blumenthal to be part of the party’s business/corporatist wing. But I guess they hate diplomacy too.

This is of particular note:

The most interesting are Booker and Gillibrand, both harboring presidential ambitions.

They never learn.

The good news is that there is some pressure being brought to bear on these fools from the other direction:

A group of national security experts and American foreign policy luminaries sent a letter on Monday to the primary co-sponsors of an Iran sanctions bill asking them to reconsider the measure, saying it jeopardizes the ongoing negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear program and could bring the United States closer to war with Iran.

After various avenues to put forth Iran sanctions measures recently failed, Sens. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Mark Kirk (R-IL) introduced the stand-alone bill late last month. Nearly 50 senators — mostly Republicans — have signed on as co-sponsors, but the chairs of 10 Senate committees recently wrote to Senate Majority Harry Reid (D-NV) slamming the bill and asking him not to move forward with it. The White House has said it will veto the bill if it passes.

You can weigh in yourself if you’re so inclined.

Unless you agree with Holy Joe Lieberman and think a good brisk war with Iran is not only inevitable but just what the doctor ordered.

Update: Also too, from Max Fisher:

… if Gates is going to take shots at Biden on this scale, it’s worth asking how Gates would fare under similar scrutiny. I am not appropriately positioned to evaluate Gates’s positions on “every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” But I can tell you how he performed on the single most important one he ever confronted: ending the Cold War. He was, quite simply, dead wrong.

Back in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev took over as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the United States faced a really big dilemma. Gorbachev professed to be a reformer. Should the United States work with him to reduce nuclear weapons, ease the U.S.-Soviet proxy battles that were at that point directly responsible for a number of deadly conflicts around the world and, just maybe, try to end the Cold War? This wasn’t just a major, difficult question: It would turn out to be one of the most important U.S. foreign policy decisions in decades.

President Ronald Reagan eventually came around to the idea that, yes, he could and should work with Gorbachev. He was persuaded by, among others, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who famously said that Gorbachev was a man the West could do business with.

But Reagan had to overcome the fierce opposition of a top CIA Kremlinologist and eventual CIA director named Robert M. Gates, who maintained for years that Gorbachev was no reformer, that he was not to be trusted and that Reagan would be walking into a Soviet ploy.

Quite simply, Gates was wrong, overruled by Reagan, and the world was better off for it.

Uhm yeah. It goes without saying that Presidents need to be skeptical of the spooks too.

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Update II:  Greg Sargent reports on the current state of play on the Iran question.  There are some Democrats who are pushing back hard. But about 30 remain “undecided.”

WTF?  This is a big question for them? With a Democratic president pushing hard for a deal and a decade of expensive, bloody war behind us that got us nowhere? Dear God …

Update III:  It appears that, as usual, it may be mistake to take Bob Woodward at his word.

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Newt redux?

by digby

This is pretty good:

I don’t know where the Democrats are showing this ad but I think it really goes right toi the point. Most people feel the pinch right now and these Republicans just seem completely out of touch. It’s one thing to say that kind of stuff when the economy doing well for most people. But at times like this it just sounds daft.

It appears the Republicans have also foolishly provided the Democrats with a nice gallery of recognizable villains to use in 2014. That’s unwise. Not that there’s much they could do about it I suppose — these high profile zealots won’t shut up. But the operatives must be very cognizant of the trouble these sorts have caused them in the past. Newt redux?

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Traitors and criminals

by digby

Today’s NY Times gives them a platform to discuss their crimes:

So on a night nearly 43 years ago, while Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier bludgeoned each other over 15 rounds in a televised title bout viewed by millions around the world, burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar and broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation office in a suburb of Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside.

They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups.

The burglary in Media, Pa., on March 8, 1971, is a historical echo today, as disclosures by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have cast another unflattering light on government spying and opened a national debate about the proper limits of government surveillance. The burglars had, until now, maintained a vow of silence about their roles in the operation. They were content in knowing that their actions had dealt the first significant blow to an institution that had amassed enormous power and prestige during J. Edgar Hoover’s lengthy tenure as director.

“When you talked to people outside the movement about what the F.B.I. was doing, nobody wanted to believe it,” said one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, who is finally going public about his involvement. “There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting.”

Mr. Forsyth, now 63, and other members of the group can no longer be prosecuted for what happened that night, and they agreed to be interviewed before the release this week of a book written by one of the first journalists to receive the stolen documents. The author, Betty Medsger, a former reporter for The Washington Post, spent years sifting through the F.B.I.’s voluminous case file on the episode and persuaded five of the eight men and women who participated in the break-in to end their silence.

Unlike Mr. Snowden, who downloaded hundreds of thousands of digital N.S.A. files onto computer hard drives, the Media burglars did their work the 20th-century way: they cased the F.B.I. office for months, wore gloves as they packed the papers into suitcases, and loaded the suitcases into getaway cars. When the operation was over, they dispersed. Some remained committed to antiwar causes, while others, like John and Bonnie Raines, decided that the risky burglary would be their final act of protest against the Vietnam War and other government actions before they moved on with their lives.

“We didn’t need attention, because we had done what needed to be done,” said Mr. Raines, 80, who had, with his wife, arranged for family members to raise the couple’s three children if they were sent to prison. “The ’60s were over. We didn’t have to hold on to what we did back then.”

The good news is that the government is now run by people who know they aren’t allowed to do this and a congress that is bold and assertive in its oversight so luckily this is nothing more than an historical note. Sure, we now have a monolithic police apparatus with technology to make that sort of surveillance look like the work of cave men, but human nature has completely changed since 1971 so it’s all good. They would never do such things today.

Carry on.

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Burning it for a purpose


by digby

I keep seeing charts like this:

and they come out in my head like this:

History has blamed Nero for the disaster, implying that he started the fire so that he could bypass the senate and rebuild Rome to his liking. Much of what is known about the great fire of Rome comes from the aristocrat and historian Tacitus, who claimed that Nero watched Rome burn while merrily playing his fiddle. Gangs of thugs prevented citizens from fighting the fire with threats of torture, Tacitus wrote. There is some support for the theory that Nero leveled the city on purpose: the Domus Aurea, Nero’s majestic series of villas and pavilions set upon a landscaped park and a man-made lake, was built in the wake of the fire.

“Nero” being a symbol of the 1%, of course. Maybe they just want to get rid of all the remnants of the American Dream once and for all and build themselves a grand vision of Galt’s Gulch in its place.

Sometimes reality intrudes in spite of the bullshit

by David Atkins

Digby already covered the insane hypocrisy of Frank Luntz whining about the loss of civility in politics. But there’s something else going on, too, that deserves note. It’s not just guilt; Luntz is genuinely reaching an upper limit to how much bullshit he can sell, echoing a point I’ve been trying to make for a long time about the fundamental shift in the politics of the 21st century. This is the key bit:

Luntz knew that he, a maker of political messages and attacks and advertisements, had helped create this negativity, and it haunted him. But it was Obama he principally blamed. The people in his focus groups, he perceived, had absorbed the president’s message of class divisions, haves and have-nots, of redistribution. It was a message Luntz believed to be profoundly wrong, but one so powerful he had no slogans, no arguments with which to beat it back. In reelecting Obama, the people had spoken. And the people, he believed, were wrong. Having spent his career telling politicians what the people wanted to hear, Luntz now believed the people had been corrupted and were beyond saving. Obama had ruined the electorate, set them at each other’s throats, and there was no way to turn back.

Why not? I ask. Isn’t finding the right words to persuade people what you do? “I’m not good enough,” Luntz says. “And I hate that. I have come to the extent of my capabilities. And this is not false modesty. I think I’m pretty good. But not good enough.” The old Frank Luntz was sure he could invent slogans to sell the righteous conservative path of personal responsibility and free markets to anyone. The new Frank Luntz fears that is no longer the case, and it’s driving him crazy.

Luntz has spent his life manipulating consumers and the electorate with good messaging and good framing. That’s not an insult, by the way. I’m in the same business. As long as humans are using language and competing with one another in business and politics, using language better than the competition will be a valid and important vocation. The morality of it lies in whether language is used to clarify or to deceive, and the purpose to which the language is put.

But language can only go so far. Wordsmithing helps you up to a point, but ultimately you can’t put lipstick on a pig unless people have a reason to want to see the pig as something other than a pig. Deception on a grand scale is rarely possible for long, unless you’re aiding the public in deceiving themselves.

That’s what Luntz made a career of. People don’t want to think of themselves as oppressed workers but temporarily embarrassed millionaires, to paraphrase Mark Twain John Steinbeck. Luntz’s words help them do that. Many whites don’t want to admit that they need government help just as much as poor minorities do, so Frank Luntz helps them build solidarity with rich whites instead. People like to see themselves as potential entrepreneurs rather than wage slaves. Luntz creates language to help keep people both financially oppressed but also emotionally satisfied, usually by thinking of themselves as better than some “other” group of people.

But at a certain point reality intrudes. After decades of failure by supply-side ideologues and their slightly less conservative neoliberal cousins, the veneer wears off. The electorate’s desire for aspirational self-regard and in-group pride cedes ground to desperation, anger and resentment over the obvious injustice of it all.

It doesn’t occur to Luntz for a second that the economy is genuinely terrible, that inequality is genuinely out of control, that the banks genuinely screwed everyone, that people genuinely haven’t had wage increases in 40 years even as cost of living spirals upward. It doesn’t occur to him that these are real problems that no language can explain away, and that people are genuinely angry and need help. Most voters may not be able to put the pieces together into a coherent whole, but they know that they’re suffering, that the system isn’t working anymore, and that fat cat elites (who they are varies depending on your political leanings, but the anger is heartfelt all the same) are profiting from all of it. No one sold them a bunch of cute phrases to convince them of that. It’s too damn obvious on its face. Those with no conscience whatsoever are still using racist and sexist code to sell the idea that the advantage-takers are welfare queens and nefarious liberal enablers, but that also only goes so far as the voters inclined to believe that age out of the electorate.

But Luntz can’t see that. Politics is all a manipulative game to him. Yes, public opinion can be shaped to a certain degree, but you can’t change reality itself. So Luntz is descending deeper into the madness of pure ideology, upset over even the idea of a safety net, while portraying President Obama as some sort of Occupy Wall Street Svengali who out-manipulated him and beat him at his game.

Sadly, much as I would like to believe that brilliant progressive wordsmithing defeated him, it didn’t. Reality finally did.

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Exceptional stupidity

by digby

Only in America could we easily believe this really happened. (And as far as I know, it did…)

A top official in New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) administration reportedly had audience members on edge when he used his handgun as a laser pointer during a presentation last year.

The Times Union reported that Jerome M. Hauer, commissioner of the New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, alarmed a foreign delegation when he used the laser sighting device on the barrel of his handgun during an Oct. 24 presentation in Albany, N.Y. on the state’s response to Superstorm Sandy.

Three Sweedish emergency managers “were rattled when the gun’s laser tracked across one of their heads before Hauer found the map of New York, at which he wanted to point,” according to the Times Union, and two people in attendance “moved quickly out of the line of the laser when he brought out the gun.”

An aide to Cuomo promised to look into the matter, while a spokesman for Hauer has said only that he’s “heard rumors” but is unaware of what exactly transpired at the presentation.

Sure, why not? What could possibly go wrong?

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A big boo hoo for poor Frank Luntz. As ye sow, dude …

by digby

So Frank Luntz is out there blubbering like a 5 year old about how divided the country has become and he just can’t figure out why. Frank Luntz!

I’m not going to bore you with his pathetic sniveling here, suffice to say he seems to be having something of a breakdown. You can read all about it in this deeply weird profile. But let’s just say that if he’s truly worried about the political and cultural division in this country he should take a look in the mirror (and check his bank account) to see just who’s been making zillions over the past few decades exploiting them.

If I may:

Luntz was Pat Buchanan’s pollster during the 1992 U.S. Republican presidential primary, and later that year served as Ross Perot’s pollster in the general election.

Luntz also served as Newt Gingrich’s pollster in mid-1990s for the Contract with America. During that time, he helped Gingrich produce a GOPAC memo that encouraged Republicans to “speak like Newt” by describing Democrats and Democratic policies using words such as “corrupt,” “devour,” “greed,” “hypocrisy,” “liberal,” “sick,” and “traitors.”

Far be it from me to assert that Luntz was the first to demonize liberals but he certainly was one of the most successful at making a profit from it.

And he’s such a lovely fellow:

FRANK LUNTZ: I always use the line for Nancy Pelosi, “You get one shot at a facelift. If it doesn’t work the first time, let it go.”

In case you missed the full scope of Luntz’s original contribution to greater civility in our politics, this might remind you:

[T]he clearest expression of Gingrich’s [and Luntz’s] philosophy of media came in a GOPAC memo entitled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Distributed to GOP candidates across the country, the memo’s list of words for Democrats and words for Republicans was endorsed by Gingrich in a cover letter: “The words in that paper are tested language from a recent series of focus groups where we actually tested ideas and language.” Next time you hear Gingrich complain about media focusing on the negative, refer back to these lists.

As you know, one of the key points in the GOPAC tapes is that “language matters.” In the video “We Are a Majority,” Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates, we have heard a plaintive plea: “I wish I could speak like Newt.”That takes years of practice. But we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.

This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words to use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing electronic media. The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible. And remember that, like any tool, these words will not help if they are not used….

Contrasting Words

Often we search hard for words to help us define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.

decay… failure (fail)… collapse(ing)… deeper… crisis… urgent(cy)… destructive… destroy… sick… pathetic… lie… liberal… they/them… unionized bureaucracy… “compassion” is not enough… betray… consequences… limit(s)… shallow… traitors… sensationalists…
endanger… coercion… hypocrisy… radical… threaten… devour… waste… corruption… incompetent… permissive attitudes… destructive… impose… self-serving… greed… ideological… insecure… anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs… pessimistic… excuses… intolerant…
stagnation… welfare… corrupt… selfish… insensitive… status quo… mandate(s)… taxes… spend(ing)… shame… disgrace… punish (poor…)… bizarre… cynicism… cheat… steal… abuse of power… machine… bosses… obsolete… criminal rights… red tape… patronage

There was also a list of positive terms to refer to themselves, naturally.

That was a long time ago. This is a more recent example of the same work.

The reporter who interviewed Luntz for the profile was confused by his angst, unable to figure out exactly what it was that so upsets him today. I’d say he’s suffering from delusions — and guilt:

He feels a kinship with Jeff Daniels’ character, the gruff, guilt-ridden, ostensibly Republican antihero, who is uncomfortable with small talk and driven by a “mission to civilize.” “I love that phrase,” Luntz says. “That doesn’t happen in anything that we do.”

No. No it doesn’t.

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Does our system require martyrdom?

by digby

On Ari Melber’s new show today (which is quite good by the way) he interviewed Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler about his call for clemency for Snowden back in November.  It was an interesting exchange, and I think he provided the best response to the administration supporters who insist that Snowden is a coward for failing to “come home” and, presumably, go to jail:

Do we want a system where only martyrs will come forward?

I think that’s a good question.  Do we?

I haven’t heard anyone evoke Mandela as one of Snowden’s proper role models  recently, but I suppose that’s because they probably learned about the fact that he didn’t volunteer himself for jail but was rather a fugitive for many years before he was caught and thrown to molder in jail for decades. Still he was a martyr. The crimes of which he was accused are quite similar in seriousness and potential penalties to those the US government is leveling at Snowden.  The price could be very steep indeed. And the statutes under which he’s been charged would not allow him to speak freely.

We have had martyrs, of course.  Martin Luther King is an example of a great moral hero who was gunned down for his beliefs. But while the authorities hounded him and denied him his civil rights and civil liberties, it didn’t have the ability to hold him in jail longer than a couple of weeks for his civil disobedience.  He never faced a long prison term (or worse) at the hands of the government.

There was one American who did and he was the very fellow the Espionage Act of 1917, the statute Snowden is accused of violating, was passed to deal with: Eugene V Debs. I think most people today would consider that case a shocking abuse of government power to silence dissent. There were many calls for commutation, clemency and pardons. At the time Woodrow Wilson wrote:

“While the flower of American youth was pouring out its blood to vindicate the cause of civilization, this man, Debs, stood behind the lines sniping, attacking, and denouncing them….This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration.”

He did have his sentence commuted by President Harding not long after.

My point is that demanding people selflessly martyr themselves in order to be respectable seems odd. If you don’t think Snowden should done what he did then what difference does it make if he is caught by the authorities or he throws himself on the mercy of the justice system? The act is what the act is. If you think his act revealed something important that the people needed to know about and which will lead to some changes, however temporary,  then I would think you would call for mercy from the government. If you think he’s a traitor, then I guess you think he deserves to be locked up for a long time. Our justice system is remarkably flexible in this way — if we want it to be.

The government makes deals all the time. There’s no need for martyrdom in America.

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Here’s what it means to actually deal with inequality

by David Atkins

Yesterday I derisively responded to the new “revelation” that Democrats are going to double down on income inequality issues by focusing on unemployment benefits and the minimum wage. I noted that while those are crucially important issues, they don’t begin to address the real inequality problem which extends far beyond the most downtrodden members of society. It’s a 99% versus 1% issue, and wage versus asset issue. It’s also an issue of reorienting the deal between society and its people for a 21st century characterized by globalization, mechanization flattening and deskilling of the labor market, which is something I’ve been writing about for some time now.

There has been some good thinking about these issues in some of the more innovative corners of the left. Over at Rolling Stone, Jesse Myerson has a good set of five proposals that seem the most promising at the moment. Here’s the first:

1. Guaranteed Work for Everybody

Unemployment blows. The easiest and most direct solution is for the government to guarantee that everyone who wants to contribute productively to society is able to earn a decent living in the public sector. There are millions of people who want to work, and there’s tons of work that needs doing – it’s a no-brainer. And this idea isn’t as radical as it might sound: It’s similar to what the federal Works Progress Administration made possible during Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. vocally supported a public-sector job guarantee in the 1960s.

A job guarantee that paid a living wage would anchor prices, drive up conditions for workers at megacorporations like Walmart and McDonald’s, and target employment for the poor and long-term unemployed – people to whom conventional stimulus money rarely trickles all the way down. The program would automatically expand during private-sector downturns and contract during private-sector upswings, balancing out the business cycle and sending people from job to job, rather than job to unemployment, when times got tough.

Some economists have proposed running a job guarantee through the non-profit sector, which would make it even easier to suit the job to the worker. Imagine a world where people could contribute the skills that inspire them – teaching, tutoring, urban farming, cleaning up the environment, painting murals – rather than telemarketing or whatever other stupid tasks bosses need done to supplement their millions. Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Also on the list are Social Security for all, sovereign wealth funds, public banks, and a land value tax. The land value tax is particularly intriguing for those of us who see the shift in public savings from pensions to real estate as an incredibly misguided, destabilizing and destructive force:

Ever noticed how much landlords blow? They don’t really do anything to earn their money. They just claim ownership of buildings and charge people who actually work for a living the majority of our incomes for the privilege of staying in boxes that these owners often didn’t build and rarely if ever improve. In a few years, my landlord will probably sell my building to another landlord and make off with the appreciated value of the land s/he also claims to own – which won’t even get taxed, as long as s/he ploughs it right back into more real estate.

Think about how stupid that is. The value of the land has nothing to do with my idle, remote landlord; it reflects the nearby parks and subways and shops, which I have access to thanks to the community and the public. So why don’t the community and the public derive the value and put it toward uses that benefit everyone? Because capitalism, is why.

The most mainstream way of flipping the script is a simple land-value tax. By targeting wealthy real estate owners and their free rides, we can fight inequality and poverty directly, make disastrous asset price bubbles impossible and curb Wall Street’s hideous bloat. There are cooler ideas out there, too: Municipalities themselves can be big-time landowners, and groups can even create large-scale community land trusts so that the land is held in common. In any case, we have to stop letting rich people pretend they privately own what nature provided everyone.

Until and unless Democrats start addressing these sorts of proposals, as well as specifically definancializing ones like a transaction tax, they’re not really focusing on the sickness at the heart of the modern economy. They’re just playing a neoliberal game to slightly improve the lives of those who have been pushed to the very margins, which in turn helps conservative to wedge the middle class against the destitute.

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Sobering numbers about money in politics

by digby

Via Think Progress:

A political network linked to conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch raised at least $407 million in the last election, almost matching Mitt Romney’s campaign funds. By comparison, the Koch network raised more than George W. Bush did in 2004, and outdid both presidential candidates in 2000.

According to an analysis from the Washington Post and Center for Responsive Politics, the labyrinth of 17 tax-exempt Koch groups shielded wealthy individuals from disclosing their donations, including the exact amount the two billionaires contribute. A vast amount came through two main groups with ties to Koch officials, which fed $302 million to a wider network — Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth, the American Energy Alliance, Heritage Action, among others.

They’re up to 72 billion now.

Here’s that perspective for you once again::

Even if that 400 million came out of the brothers’ own pockets, and it didn’t,  it still wouldn’t amount to more than chump change. There is no limit to how much they can spend on politics if they choose too.

And even if they don’t win, which they obviously do not always do, this money distorts everything in our democracy. Short of climate change I don’t think there is a bigger — and more intractable — problem.

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